RE: keeping trac

First impressions are pretty good in as you say it offers greater continuity
for the whole project and makes it much less daunting for the uninitiated to
see all the workings from one familiar looking platform.

Taking a quick look at a few pages reveals that there was some poorly formed
wiki formatting in the original pages which means the formatting is not
properly applied in trac, however this is minor and can be corrected with a
bit of time, some by across the board find and replace operations perhaps?

Obviously the format and look is different from the wiki and therefore will
take a little time to get used to and some new tools and differences from
the wiki to learn for those contributing and editing but these should not be
seen as negatives.

Finally I would also suggest that if changes are being made its time for the
root home page for OSM to more greatly reflect the work going on behind the
scenes. The danger at the moment is that visitors reach the page, open the
map, see very little, and then leave. We want more people to get interested
and a lot of that comes about from reading about the project on the
wiki...etc.

I guess what I am thinking is that either the OSM page needs to have more
links to sections of the wiki (perhaps some key enticing words in a separate
box) or the front page of the wiki is simplified such that you reach the
viewer, editor and all the other valuable sections and the front page of the
wiki and this effectively becomes the home page. May be my rambling thoughts
here but there is a need I think to gel the whole package together. It would
also reduce the number of bookmarks I need for OSM in my browser!

I might be the only one who uses a template -- {{city}} -- on the
current MediaWiki, and that would have to be rewritten as a Macro.
A useful import/conversion function should translate MediaWiki
template calls to Trac macro calls. I could do this in Perl, but
I'm not fluent enough in Python.

Yes, the import script is simplistic. As you might have figured, I ran
it to import things and started fixing pages manually which wasn't too
hard.

> I might be the only one who uses a template -- {{city}} -- on the
> current MediaWiki, and that would have to be rewritten as a Macro.
> A useful import/conversion function should translate MediaWiki
> template calls to Trac macro calls. I could do this in Perl, but
> I'm not fluent enough in Python.

I don't know any python either, and I like your template so we'll have
to figure out something there.

Re: keeping trac

> Hi everyone, especially people helping with the wiki,
>
> I've installed trac
>
> http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/>
> here:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/trac/>
> With a bit of luck it can replace mediawiki, websvn and bugzilla in one.
> There are ways of magically converting mediawiki pages to it and it's
> nicer than the things we're using at the moment.
>
> What do you think? Anyone have experience or reservations?

I have no problem with replacing websvn & bugzilla, these are largely
unused by me. Integration of accounts is brilliant.

However I have grown attached to MediaWiki, in comparison Trac,
currently looks butt ugly. MediaWiki's user interface is much better in
my opinion. Some points off the top of my head:

Re: keeping trac

Coming very late into this discussion, I support the decision to keep mediawiki for the wiki and use trac for everything else.

Andy's suggestion about the portal is a really good one - at the moment the initial interface is a bit unexciting. The disabled radio buttons for street and postcode are confusing as well, they look broken instead of just disabled pending the latest lead forward. To provide some end user experience: when I first checked out the site a while ago, I saw the front page, launched the applet, was baffled by the interface and then it crashed. It took me a while to come back for a second look. I suspect that some aspects of this may recur for new visitors, especially less technical people.

Could the front page feature some content from the db - such as the last ten streetnames added, activity per day this week, small maps of busy areas, etc? The news feed would be nice too.

> Steve,
>
> First impressions are pretty good in as you say it offers greater continuity
> for the whole project and makes it much less daunting for the uninitiated to
> see all the workings from one familiar looking platform.
>
> Taking a quick look at a few pages reveals that there was some poorly formed
> wiki formatting in the original pages which means the formatting is not
> properly applied in trac, however this is minor and can be corrected with a
> bit of time, some by across the board find and replace operations perhaps?
>
> Obviously the format and look is different from the wiki and therefore will
> take a little time to get used to and some new tools and differences from
> the wiki to learn for those contributing and editing but these should not be
> seen as negatives.
>
> Finally I would also suggest that if changes are being made its time for the
> root home page for OSM to more greatly reflect the work going on behind the
> scenes. The danger at the moment is that visitors reach the page, open the
> map, see very little, and then leave. We want more people to get interested
> and a lot of that comes about from reading about the project on the
> wiki...etc.
>
> I guess what I am thinking is that either the OSM page needs to have more
> links to sections of the wiki (perhaps some key enticing words in a separate
> box) or the front page of the wiki is simplified such that you reach the
> viewer, editor and all the other valuable sections and the front page of the
> wiki and this effectively becomes the home page. May be my rambling thoughts
> here but there is a need I think to gel the whole package together. It would
> also reduce the number of bookmarks I need for OSM in my browser!
>
> Andy Robinson
> [hidden email]>
> Andy Robinson
> [hidden email]>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [hidden email] [mailto:openstreetmap-
> > [hidden email]] On Behalf Of SteveC
> > Sent: 09 November 2005 14:46
> > To: [hidden email]> > Subject: [Openstreetmap] keeping trac
> >
> > Hi everyone, especially people helping with the wiki,
> >
> > I've installed trac
> >
> > http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/> >
> > here:
> >
> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/trac/> >
> > With a bit of luck it can replace mediawiki, websvn and bugzilla in one.
> > There are ways of magically converting mediawiki pages to it and it's
> > nicer than the things we're using at the moment.
> >
> > What do you think? Anyone have experience or reservations?
> >
> > have fun,
> >
> > SteveC [hidden email]http://www.asklater.com/steve/> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Openstreetmap mailing list
> > [hidden email]> > http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstreetmap>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openstreetmap mailing list
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